Benjamin Cohen: How the battle for gay marriage was finally won

This week the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act has become law — testament to how civilised society now is

Friday 19 July 2013 10:34 BST

At 3:06pm on July 17, I became an equal citizen of this country and centuries of discrimination against gays and lesbians were wiped from the face of history, as the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act passed into law. Yes, it was secured after months of bruising and sometimes hugely offensive debates in Parliament but the first same-sex marriages will be conducted on England and Wales from next year. As David Cameron has rightly said before, the life prospects of every single young person who plucks up the courage to say “Mum, Dad, I’m gay”, have suddenly and irreversibly changed for the better.

This historic change in the law came to our country in a way that is unique in the 16 countries and the 14 US states with same-sex marriage. That’s because it was proposed and tabled by a Conservative prime minister with the support of his Liberal Democrat deputy. He stands as the only head of government to have tabled the change in the law and led a government with the courage to fight before and not after well-funded groups like Stonewall called on him. I argue that his position reflects a change in attitudes across the country, particularly in London, and the power of the internet to impact on the political agenda.

It does seem strange when we look back at the debates of this year, that Stonewall’s chief executive Ben Summerskill said in 2009, “There are quite a lot of gay and lesbian people who wouldn’t want marriage,” and that Stonewall was concerned with “absolutely practical hard outcomes which make a real difference to people’s lives”, not changing the law on marriage.

Ben’s views were similar to the ones I had myself until the year before, until while in San Francisco, I witnessed the despair of gay couples as California voted to take away the right to marry and replace equal marriage with civil unions. Following on from that defeat, I dedicated PinkNews.co.uk, the website that I founded, to fight for marriage equality at home.

As we knew we would not have the support of Stonewall on this issue (it did not campaign on equal marriage until late 2010), we instead used the power of the internet to project our reader’s views on the issue to the political elite through reader Q&As we had been granted with each of the party leaders. These were the questions that we had hoped Stonewall might have asked but they were probably more powerful coming from ordinary people who just wanted to marry the person they loved rather than from a professional lobbyist.

While Gordon Brown stuck rigidly to the Stonewall view on civil partnerships, Nick Clegg said: “Love is the same straight or gay and the civil institution should be the same too.” Later David Cameron answered: “I want to do everything I can to support commitment and I’m open to changing things further to guarantee equality.” The Conservatives then committed to considering the case for equal marriage if Cameron became prime minister.

Clegg’s support was crucial but I expected it, Cameron’s openness was more of a surprise. Although I then remembered a 2006 speech where he said marriage “means something, whether you are a man or a woman, or a woman and a woman, or a man and another man”. A line, I’m told, that was completely his own. It is important to note, as most of those MPs who argued against his policy seemed to have forgotten, that the Conservatives were the only party to go into the election promising to review changing the law on marriage. As he pointed out later, strengthening marriage is a very conservative policy. That commitment has made many gay people reconsider their views on the party.

Clegg and Cameron did not adopt this as a government policy for fun or to be popular among a certain subsection of voters. Even among the Liberal Democrats (particularly Catholic MPs and peers), it exposed severe divisions on this important social issue, prompting homophobic diatribes that we haven’t witnessed for a generation. Clegg and Cameron did it because they believed in it, because like most Londoners, they have gay friends and colleagues whom they treat no differently because of the gender of the person they love. It’s no coincidence that one of Cameron’s gay colleagues, who has been at his side throughout this issue, has been his adviser Michael Salter, who in his spare time runs London’s gay pride festival.

It was actually after conversations with people like Michael and advisers for the other party leaders that we launched the Out4Marriage campaign, to help counter the vitriolic attacks in the media against Cameron by those who oppose gay and lesbian rights.

Out4Marriage published on video on YouTube, on PinkNews and in print in the Evening Standard testimony from ordinary people like my grandparents, politicians and celebrities ranging from Hugh Grant to Sir Richard Branson explaining why they supported equal marriage. It didn’t take much to get these celebrities or Cameron’s political opponents to participate, just an email, unusually asking a well known face to film a free advertisement to support a government policy.

They supported it because, like the Prime Minister, they understood the radical changes in attitudes towards gay people in society in general. This is not a change that is unique to Britain: in the past year alone, the number of people living in countries where same-sex marriage is legal nationwide has gone up from 289 million to a staggering 641 million. These members of Generation Y, like Cameron and Clegg and millions of Londoners with their gay family, friends and colleagues, wondered if equal marriage is good enough for Catholic Argentina and Brazil, why isn’t it for us, a largely secular and urban population? The answer is, it is.